6

aside troublesome memories along with the frightened remonstrances of her saintly sister Anne, also an excellent character sketch. She made the old Earl of Dunstanwolde entirely happy till his death, and kept her word. She did not cheat him, as weaker women do their husbands.' When free to bestow her hand on the noble gentleman who had won her heart Clorinda suddenly found her way to happiness barred by the resurrection of the ugly old secret. How she strode over all the laws which govern sophisticated humanity, onwards to virtue and honour, must be sought in the brilliant pages of this astounding story. Its power and its weakness are alike patent, there is the old tendency to a certain riotous exuberance, both in words and sentiment, the need for a male restraint matching the strong and male conception, and there are certain faults of taste and exaggerations which are not new in Mrs. Burnett's work. But A Lady of Quality is a strong book and a bold adventure in days where strength and originality are less common than excellence of literary style.

MABEL C. BIRCHENOUGH.

5

CHARLOTTE BRONTE AND HER CIRCLE'

WITH a modesty that deserves recognition, Mr. Shorter tells us in Charlotte Brontë and her Circle that his book is not a biography, but a collection of letters. The remark is to a certain extent true, and yet it is an act of bare justice to Mr. Shorter to say that in those parts of his work which are distinctly biographical he displays so keen an instinct and so deep a sympathy that one is compelled to regret that he has not attempted upon a large scale, and in the light of the new material he has at his command, a full biography of the great woman of whom he has written. As it is, we owe him a debt of gratitude that cannot easily be repaid. With extraordinary successa success which can only have been achieved by an untiring industry and an unfaltering devotion to his subject-he has brought to light and placed in the hands of his readers all those records of Charlotte Brontë's noble life that were left untouched and almost unsuspected by previous writers. If his book contains no great and novel revelations, it is simply because his heroine lived her life from first to last with a simple consistency that made her at all times as nearly as

1 Charlotte Brontë and her Circle, by Clement K. Shorter (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1896).

possible true to her own ideal of duty. What he has done has been to supplement the materials employed by his predecessors with a lavishness that will astonish no one so much as those who laboured before him in the same field. He has added a great many letters of Charlotte Brontë's to those which the public already treasured. He has brought to light one or two that are of peculiar interest and significance, as casting light upon the innermost mind of the writer; and he has given us that fresh chapter in her life which of necessity had to remain unwritten, not only when Mrs. Gaskell produced her great biography, but twenty years later, when I had the honour of following her afar-off in the same task. The chapter of which I speak is that which touches upon Charlotte Brontë's life as the wife of Mr. Nicholls.

It is superfluous now to speak of the extraordinary fascination which the story of Haworth Parsonage and its illustrious inmates possesses for most cultured men and women. Charlotte and Emily Brontë have taken their place with the immortals, and their lives as well as their works have become part of the national heritage. Mr. Shorter enables us to study the simple and pathetic story from a new point of view, and there is no possible point of view from which it is not worth studying. If there are any still ignorant of it, this book may be safely commended to them; for, though it cannot supersede the brilliant work that we owe to the genius of Mrs. Gaskell, it will still convey to them, in the words of Charlotte Brontë herself, a true conception of two careers, each of which may fairly be described as being in its own way unique in the history of English letters. To those who know the story already Mr. Shorter's volume will be doubly welcome because of the fresh light it throws upon its subject, and the new material which it places in the hands of its readers.

But in the brief space at my command I am compelled to touch upon one or two points on which I find myself at issue with the author of Charlotte Brontë and her Circle. The little book which I published twenty years ago on the same subject has long been out of print; but Mr. Shorter has paid me the high compliment of dealing with some of the theories I advanced in that volume, and, whilst treating me with a courtesy which it is my duty to acknowledge, has not concealed the fact that he differs from me. In the first of these questions of controversy he differs also from an infinitely greater authority, Mrs. Gaskell herself. This is as to the character of Mr. Brontë, the father of Charlotte and Emily. It would seem quite clear,' he says, 'to any careful investigator that the Reverend Patrick Brontë was a much-maligned man;' and, continuing, he distinctly challenges Mrs. Gaskell's portrait of the old gentleman. That there was exaggeration in that portrait I ventured to point out twenty years ago. But that Mr. Brontë was 'maligned,' or that he was anything, in his youth and manhood, but an extremely difficult person

to live with, I cannot admit. Mr. Shorter has had to gather the materials for his work more than thirty years after Mr. Brontë's death. It is not surprising that the stories which made so deep an impression on Mrs. Gaskell, and which still retained their original shape when, nearly thirty years ago, I began my own inquiries into this fascinating subject, had been softened and toned down by time long before they reached Mr. Shorter's ears. Mr. Brontë himself was softened and subdued after the death of his children. I remember a letter written to me by Mrs. Gaskell in 1859, or thereabouts, in which she described at length a visit she had paid to Haworth, and spoke of the extraordinary and touching change that had taken place in Mr. Brontë's manner and character. It is not surprising that those survivors who still remember the old gentleman should instinctively recur to those six years of chastened tenderness and penitence rather than to the many preceding years when he lived his life almost alone in the midst of his family, and when his eccentricities and foibles, to use no harsher word, made him an object of wonder and apprehension to his neighbours. This phenomenon, the effacement by time of the harsher features of the dead in the memory of the living, is too common to call for explanation. But if any evidence is needed of the fact that Mr. Brontë was the reverse of an amiable or reasonable man in his relations with those around him, one has only to turn to the remarkable chapter in which Mr. Shorter has told us, through the medium of Charlotte Brontë's own letters, the story of her engagement to Mr. Nicholls. Her sense of justice, outraged by her father's furious and flagrant injustice, was beyond all question the force which drove her into that engagement. That it was in all respects a happy one for her, and that Mr. Nicholls proved himself not only a devoted but a worthy husband, does not affect this indisputable fact.

The only other point of difference between myself and Mr. Shorter on which it is necessary to touch in these pages has reference to Charlotte Brontë's visit to Brussels, and to its effect upon her life and character.

The second visit of Charlotte Brontë to Brussels (says Mr. Shorter, p. 207) has given rise to much speculation, some of it of not the pleasantest kind. It is well to face the point bluntly, for it has been more than once implied that Charlotte Brontë was in love with M. Héger, as her prototype Lucy Snowe was in love with Paul Emanuel. The assumption, which is absolutely groundless, has had certain plausible points in its favour, not the least obvious, of course, being the inclination to read autobiography into every line of Charlotte Brontë's writings. Then there is a passage in a printed letter to Miss Nussey which has been quoted as if to bear out this suggestion: "I returned to Brussels after aunt's death,' she writes,' against my conscience, prompted by what then seemed an irresistible impulse. I was punished for my selfish folly by a total withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of mind.'

This remarkable passage in Charlotte Brontë's letter Mr. Shorter

explains by saying that the 'misgiving which weighed so heavily upon her mind afterwards was due to the fact that she had left her father practically unprotected from the enticing company of a too festive curate.'

I shall not dispute the existence of the festive curate, and alas! I cannot ignore the evidence that, not only at the period to which Mr. Shorter refers, but at other times in Mr. Brontë's life, that unfortunate man fell into temptation. But as I was the first to draw attention to the special significance of Charlotte Brontë's experiences in Brussels, and to the undoubted effect they had upon her life and character, I am bound to re-state my position. I never applied the term 'falling in love' to her feeling towards M. Héger. What I did say 2 was that 'her spirit, if not her heart, had been captured and held captive in the Belgian city;' and I cannot, even in the light of Mr. Shorter's new evidence, alter my opinion. Surely the 'irresistible impulse' which drew her back to Brussels when she felt that she ought to have remained at home, and the yielding to which was punished by ‘a total withdrawal for more than two years of happiness and peace of mind,' was something real. There never was a saner woman than Charlotte Brontë, and she could never have written in this fashion to her friend if she had merely imagined this thing. Nor is it possible to ignore the evidence which supports the theory that Charlotte Brontë, pure and noble woman as she was from first to last, had been fascinated by her brilliant and eccentric master in Brussels. Not even her genius would have enabled her to draw the portrait of Paul Emanuel if she had not herself experienced something of that overmastering intellectual influence which in her novel he exercises over Lucy Snowe. I have no desire to press the unconcealed dislike and jealousy which was felt towards her by Madame Héger too far; but the evidence of her great book, and of her own letters after her return from Brussels, points unmistakably to the one logical conclusion that is to be drawn from the words she wrote to Miss Nussey regarding the 'irresistible impulse' which drew her back to Brussels when she knew in her heart that she ought to have stayed at home. She had found a mind there which fairly dominated her own, and held it captive for the time; and all the deeper experiences of her soul, all the higher flights of her intellect, may be said to date from that period in her life. Who is there who will honour her the less because she was thus susceptible to the influence of a mind which she believed to be stronger than her own? Nobody has said, and nobody believes, that M. Héger was Charlotte Brontë's lover, even in the most platonic sense of the word. But that for a time he was her master, the controlling influence in her intellectual life, cannot, I think, be seriously disputed.

There are many other portions of Mr. Shorter's fascinating volume 2 Charlotte Brontë: a Monograph, p. 60.

which, if space permitted, it would be a delight to dwell upon. It would have been interesting, for example, to discuss the claim set forth on behalf of Branwell Brontë to a share in the authorship of Wuthering Heights. The claim was absolutely unfounded, but the evidence by which it was supported is stronger than Mr. Shorter is disposed to admit. The fact that I differ from him on some points only makes me feel, however, the more strongly the debt which, in common with all who love and honour the memory of Charlotte Brontë, I owe him for the labour which has enriched our knowledge of his heroine so greatly. His book will always hold a prominent place by the side of Mrs. Gaskell's noble Life, and will remain a permanent magazine to which those who desire in future to understand or criticise the character of one of the greatest of Englishwomen will resort for the materials on which to found their judgment.